Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

The above example from Douglass demonstrates how whiteness, in the words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, operates as property.23 According to Harris, the fact that white identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liberties, and self-identity were affirmed for white people, while being denied to black people. The latter’s only access to whiteness was through “passing.” Douglass’s comments indicate how this property interest in whiteness was easily reversed in schemes to deny black people their rights to due process. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass discusses above emerged in the United States during the 1990s: in Boston, Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and attempted to blame an anonymous black man, and in Union, South Carolina, Susan Smith killed her children and claimed they had been abducted by a black carjacker. The racialization of crime—the tendency to “impute crime to color,” to use Frederick Douglass’s words—did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery.